A BRIEF HISTORY
The French have always wanted to know what it means to be
a Frenchman. Their history has been a constant quest for national
identity: a conflict between strong regional loyalties and central
authority.
In about 2000 b.c. Celtic tribes — probably from eastern
Europe — came looking for greener pastures in the areas that are now
Franche-Comté, Alsace, and Burgundy. At the same time, migrants from
the Mediterranean countries were trickling into the south.
The first recorded settlement was the trading post set up by
Phocaean Greeks from Asia Minor at Massalia (Marseilles) around
600 b.c. , followed by other ports at Hyères, Antibes, and Nice. But
the Greeks developed few contacts with the interior beyond a little
commerce in olives and wine with the Celts of Burgundy. When their
position was threatened by Ligurian pirates at sea and warlike tribes
from inland, the merchants of Marseilles called on Rome for help.
From Gaul to France
In 125 b.c. , the Romans came in force, conquered the
“Gallic barbarians,” and set up a fortress at Aquae Sextiae
(Aix-en-Provence). They took advantage of this new stronghold to create
Provincia (now Provence), stretching from the Alps to the Pyrénées, in
order to guarantee communications between Italy and Spain. When this
province was endangered by fresh attacks from the north, Julius Caesar
himself took charge, conquering practically the whole of Gaul by
50 b.c. Caesar drew Gaul’s northeastern frontier at the Rhine, taking
in present-day Belgium, and warned that the Germanic tribes across
the river — the Franks (after whom France is named), Alamans, and
Saxons — would always threaten the security of the frontier.
The Romanization of Gaul sent the most energetic warriors to
defend the outposts of the empire while their families settled down to
work the land or build towns such as Lyon, Orange, Arles, and Nîmes,
and the first great highways between them. At the same time, merchants
built up a thriving trade with the rest of the Roman Empire. The
pattern for the peasantry and bourgeoisie of France was thus
established.
Christianity was introduced into Gaul in the first century
a.d. , but was not really accepted until the late fourth century, when
it became the empire’s official religion. Large-scale conversions were
led by Martin de Tours, a soldier turned cleric. (Sword and cross were
to form a regular alliance in French history. ) The new religion soon
cemented national solidarity in the face of more barbarian invasions,
this time by the Franks.
Gallic unity collapsed with the crumbling Roman Empire. King
Clovis, the leader of the Franks, defeated the Roman armies at
Soissons in 486 and won the allegiance of most Gallo-Romans by
converting to Christianity ten years later. With Paris as his capital,
he extended his rule to the Mediterranean. The realm was divided up
among his heirs and progressively fragmented by the rivalries of the
Merovingian dynasty that battled for power over the next 300 years.
Despite this fragmentation, the Franks deeply impacted the
cultural and linguistic heritage of France. The Germanic traditions and
language of the north became distinct from the Gallo-Roman traditions
longer preserved in the Mediterranean basin.
Spain’s Arab rulers exploited this disunity to sweep north
across Gaul, controlling Languedoc, Dordogne, and a large part of
Provence, before being defeated at Poitiers in 732 by the army of
Charles Martel. Even the mighty Charlemagne, king of the Franks from
768 to 814, did not manage to create an enduring national unity; his
sons fought for the spoils of his empire. The Normans from
Scandinavia took advantage of the Carolingian dynasty’s divided
kingdom, pillaging their way inland along the Loire and the Seine, and
plundering Paris in 845. In addition, Saracens invaded the Provençal
coast from North Africa, and Magyar armies attacked Lorraine and
Burgundy. To keep the support of the nobles’ armies, the kings had to
give the nobles more and more land. Consequently, the realm broke up
into the fiefdoms of the feudal Middle Ages, precursors of the
country’s classical provinces — Provence, Burgundy, Normandy,
Brittany, and so forth.
In the central region, from the Loire Valley to Belgium,
Hugues Capet succeeded in achieving a precarious ascendancy, and was
crowned the first king of France in 987. As had happened at the fall of
the Roman Empire, the Christian Church provided the essential element
of national unity. Hugues was anointed at Reims with an oil said to
have been brought to earth by the angels, thus establishing kingship by
divine right for the French.
Middle Ages
The alliance with the Church served as the underpinning of
regal authority. In exchange for the anointment, the Church was
enriched with lands and the right of taxation by tithe, a percentage of
the farmer’s seasonal produce.
After the more sober spirituality of the Romanesque
churches, the soaring Gothic cathedrals of Chartres, Paris
(Notre-Dame), Bourges, and Amiens were at once monuments to the glory
of God and testimony to the sheer power, spiritual and temporal, of the
Roman Catholic Church.
France, dubbed by the pope “eldest daughter of the Church,”
took the lead in the Crusades against the “infidels” in Palestine,
stopping off on the way across Europe to massacre heretics and
infidels. Louis IX of France, the ideal Christian king for the justice
he handed down to his subjects and for the Crusades he led to the Holy
Land, was sainted after his death in Tunis in 1270. From 1309 to 1377,
Avignon was the papal seat.
France’s other major preoccupation was England. In 1066,
Duc Guillaume of Normandy crossed the English Channel in a successful
military campaign and became William the Conqueror. For the next 400
years, English and French monarchs fought over the sovereignty of
various parts of France — among them Aquitaine, Touraine, Normandy, and
Flanders.
Between France and England ensued tangled marital alliances
and military clashes more important to national morale than to
resolving their perennial conflict — such as Bouvines (1214), a victory
for the French, and Crécy (1346) and Agincourt (1415) for the English.
Finally, a teenager from Lorraine, Jeanne d’Arc (Joan of Arc), roused
the French to resist the English at Orléans. The English captured her
and burned her at the stake in Rouen in 1431, but her martyrdom stirred
national pride sufficiently to oust the English from France 20 years
later.
The disputes among nobles were not the first concern of
ordinary French citizens. To the common man, wars were just another
hardship, taking sons away from the farm to fight, while the armies —
French as much as foreign — ravaged the land or pillaged the towns.
During war and peace alike in this feudal age, the Church and the
aristocracy continued to claim their respective portions of the
peasants’ labor, leaving barely enough for subsistence. All too
frequently a cycle of drought, famine, and plague would decimate the
population.
In any case, large portions of France were independently
controlled by powerful dukes whose allegiance to the king was only
nominal. The modern unity of France was in the making.
Ancien Régime
Absolute power was the dominant feature of what
post-Revolutionary France called the Ancien Régime. The monarchy made
noticeable gains under François I (1515–47). He strengthened central
administration and abandoned an initially tolerant policy toward the
Protestants. A debonair Renaissance prince and patron of the arts, he
introduced a grandiose style at court.
François brought Leonardo da Vinci to work at Blois, and
Rosso and Primaticcio to decorate Fontainebleau. He also commissioned
paintings by Raphael and Titian for the royal collections that are now
the pride of the Louvre. A new opulent architecture blossomed with the
châteaux of the Loire and around Paris. In foreign affairs, after he
had crushed the Duke of Milan’s army at Marignano and formed a showy
alliance with Henry VIII of England, François I’s European ambitions
were halted by the German Emperor Charles V. François even suffered the
indignity of a year’s imprisonment in Madrid, following a resounding
defeat at Pavia in 1525.
The bloody 16th-century conflicts between Catholics and
Protestants throughout Europe centered more on political and
financial intrigue than on questions of theology. The French Wars of
Religion pitted the Catholic forces of the regent Catherine de Médicis
against the Protestant (Huguenot) camp headed by Henri de Navarre.
Their crisis came on 24 August 1572 with the infamous Saint
Bartholomew’s Day Massacre. Two thousand Protestants, in Paris for
Henri’s wedding to Catherine’s daughter Marguerite de Valois, were
killed. The general massacre of Protestants spread to the countryside,
and by October another 30,000 had lost their lives.
The conciliatory policies that painfully emerged after the
bloodshed brought the Protestant Prince of Navarre to the throne as
Henri IV (1589–1610), but not before he promised to convert to
Catholicism. The enormous personal popularity of this good-natured but
tough king from the Pyrénées proved vital for healing the wounds from
the bitter wars. The Edict of Nantes was signed in 1598 to protect the
Protestants, and five years later the Jesuits were allowed back into
France. Henri maintained a reputation as a worthy and brave leader —
and at the same time as an incorrigible womanizer — until his
assassination in 1610 by a religious zealot.
The country floundered in uncertainty under the regency of
Marie de Médicis, mother of the young Louis XIII, until Cardinal
Richelieu took charge as prime minister in 1624. Directing national
policy until his death in 1642, Richelieu reasserted the authority of
his king against both the conservative Catholics who surrounded the
queen mother and the Protestant forces that were fiercely defending the
privileges granted them by the Edict of Nantes. With his successful
siege of the Protestant stronghold at La Rochelle, the cardinal
neutralized the threat of their military strength while guaranteeing
their freedom of worship.
Richelieu’s major achievement was the greater
centralization of royal power, laying the foundations of the strong
sense of national identity that has characterized France ever since. He
tightened the king’s control over legislation and taxes, enraging the
Vatican by daring to impose a new levy on the Church. More powerful
royal stewards were sent out to diminish the autonomy of the regional
parlements, councils with judicial rather than legislative functions,
dominated by the high clergy and the nobles. The cardinal also created
the Académie Française in 1635 to ensure the purity and clarity of the
French language through its Dictionnaire and its Grammaire.
Promoting overseas trade and the founding of a navy,
Richelieu also launched France on the road to empire with the
colonization of Guadeloupe and Martinique in the Caribbean. In Europe,
the Catholic cardinal, master of practical politics, was not above
supporting the Protestant Swedish, Danish, and German forces in the
Thirty Years’ War against the Catholic Austrians, Italians, and
Spanish. All that mattered was that it served France’s interests.
Richelieu’s protégé Mazarin, another cardinal, took over
the job of prime minister during the minority of Louis XIV. The court
and regional aristocracy were infuriated by the Italian-born
churchman’s intimate relationship with the king’s mother, Anne of
Austria. Nor did they like his astounding knack for amassing a vast
personal fortune while managing, very efficiently, the affairs of
state. But most of all, they despised the way he eroded the nobles’
power and smoothed the path to an increasingly absolutist monarchy.
The revolts of the Fronde forced Mazarin, Anne, and the
boy-king to flee from Paris in 1649. However, the royal family’s
triumphant return three years later, with the rebellious nobles
crushed, saw the monarchy stronger than ever.
Louis XIV drew his own conclusions from Mazarin’s careful
coaching in affairs of state. When he began his personal rule in 1661,
at the age of 23, there was no question of a new prime minister
impinging on the royal prerogative. Adopting the unequivocal emblem of
the sun, Louis was to be outshone by no one. Counselors were wholly
subservient. Louis never once called upon the parliamentary assembly of
the Etats généraux. He moved the court to Versailles, impoverished the
nobility by forcing them to contribute to the incredible luxury of his
palace, and imposed as their sole function the support of the king in
time of war.
Versailles was truly the shining star of Europe by its
architectural splendor, and most of all by the sheer hypnotic power of
Louis XIV’s cult of self-glorification. In his lifetime, many petty
European princes tried to imitate Louis’s style with their own little
Versailles, complete with court artists and sycophants. But Versailles
was not without cost. It took French historians a long time to come to
terms with the less attractive realities of what Louis’s style cost the
nation.
To enhance his glory, the Sun King turned to foreign
conquest. The devastating military expedition he launched across the
Rhineland and Palatinate, and the series of largely fruitless wars with
Spain, Holland, England, and Sweden did not endear him to the European
people. Moreover, these ventures left France’s once-thriving economy in
ruins.
At home, his authoritarian rule required a brutal police
force. Taxes soared to pay for his wars, and more and more peasants had
to abandon their fields when press-ganged into his armies. Influenced
in later life by the Catholic piety of Madame de Maintenon, his
mistress and subsequently secret wife, Louis put an end to religious
freedom for Protestants by revoking the Edict of Nantes. In the face of
forced conversions, the Protestant Huguenots — many of them the most
talented bankers, merchants, and artisans of their generation — fled to
Switzerland, Germany, Holland, England, and Scandinavia.
Louis died in 1715. Having outlived his children and
grandchildren, he was succeeded by his five-year-old great-grandson,
Louis XV. But government was in the hands of the late king’s cultured,
libertine, and atheist brother, Philippe d’Orléans.
After the morose twilight years of the Sun King, the
societal tone changed with the satiric pen of Voltaire and the erotic
fantasies of Watteau’s paintings and Marivaux’s comedies. The court
moved back from Versailles to Paris. The generally lazy regent gave
incompetent nobles too much of a say in the running of the state.
Regional parlements obtained the right to make protest, and the
monarchy gradually weakened.
The easy-going Louis XV was called the Bien-Aimé (Beloved),
at least in the first half of his reign. The king seemed more
interested in his mistresses than in running a tight ship of state.
Despite this (or perhaps because of it) the economy recovered and the
middle classes strengthened. The overseas empire expanded in the East
and West Indies, and arts and letters flourished in this age of
enlightenment.
But the new voices were a clear threat to the established
order. Diderot’s Encyclopédie championed reason over traditional
religion, Rousseau discoursed on the origins of inequality, Voltaire
shot at everything that didn’t move.
Revolution and Napoleon
Louis XVI, grandson of Louis XV, found himself attacked on
all sides. The stubborn aristocracy and high clergy were anxious to
protect their ancient privileges; a burgeoning bourgeoisie longed for
reforms that would give them greater opportunity; the peasantry was no
longer prepared to bear the burden of feudal extortion; and a growing
urban populace of artisans groaned under intolerable hardships.
The Etats généraux convened for the first time in
175 years. It was clearly the king’s enduring absolutism rather than
the throne itself that was under fire. For reactionary nobles, the king
was the guarantor of their hereditary status. Liberal reformers wanted
a constitutional monarchy similar to England’s, not a republic. Even
the grievances drawn up by the peasants and townspeople insisted on
continuing devotion to the king himself.
Two months later, the blindness of the king’s conservative
advisors and the king’s own weakness and vacillation led to the
explosion of centuries of frustration and rage — which culminated in
the storming of the Bastille, the regime’s prison-fortress in Paris. On
that fateful day, 14 July 1789, the king went hunting near his château
at Versailles. At the end of the day, Louis — apparently oblivious to
events in Paris — wrote in his diary, “Rien” (“Nothing”).
A National Assembly voted a charter for liberty and
equality, the great Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the
Citizen. The aristocracy’s feudal rights were abolished, the Church’s
massive land-holdings confiscated and sold off.
Rather than compromise, the king fled Paris in a vain
effort to join up with armed forces hostile to the Revolution. With
Austrian and German armies massing on France’s frontiers and the forces
of counter-revolution gathering inside the country, the militant
revolutionary Jacobins led by Maximilien de Robespierre saw the
king’s flight as the ultimate betrayal. A Republic was declared in
1792, and Louis XVI was guillotined in 1793. His son Louis XVII died in
obscure circumstances under the Revolutionary government, probably in
1795.
Under pressure from the poorer classes, who did not want
the Revolution appropriated for the exclusive benefit of the
bourgeoisie, the Jacobin-led revolutionary committee ordered sweeping
measures of economic and social reform, which were accompanied by a
wave of mass executions, the Terror, aimed at moderates as well as
aristocrats. Despite his attempts to quell the extremists, Robespierre
was overthrown and guillotined in the counterattack of the propertied
classes.
During their Directoire, a new wave of executions — the
White (royalist) Terror — decimated the Jacobins and their supporters.
But the bourgeoisie, fearing both the royalists and their foreign
backers, turned for salvation to a Corsican soldier triumphantly
campaigning against the Revolution’s foreign enemies — Napoleon
Bonaparte.
In between defeating the Austrians in Italy and a less
successful campaign against the British in Egypt, in 1795 Bonaparte
returned to Paris to crush the royalists, and four years later he
staged a coup against the Directoire. He was just 30 years old.
In the first flush of dictatorship as First Consul, he
established the Banque de France, created state-run lycées (high
schools), and gave the country its first national set of laws, the Code
Napoléon. The centralization dear to Richelieu and Louis XIV was
becoming a reality.
The supreme self-made man, Bonaparte in 1804 became Emperor
Napoleon at a coronation ceremony in which he audaciously took the
crown of golden laurels from the pope and placed it on his own head. He
managed to simultaneously pursue foreign conquests in Germany and
Austria and domestic reforms that included a modernized university, a
police force, and proper supplies of drinking water for Parisians.
During his disastrous campaign in Russia, he found time in Moscow to
draw up a new statute for the Comédie-Française (the national theater),
which had been dissolved during the Revolution.
The nationalism that Napoleon invoked in his conquest of
Europe’s Ancien Régime turned against him in Spain, Russia, and
Germany. The monarchies regrouped to force him from power in 1814.
Nevertheless, he made a brilliant but brief comeback the following year
— before an alliance of British, Prussian, Belgian, and Dutch troops
inflicted the final defeat at Waterloo.
Toward Democracy
At the end of the Napoleonic era, the monarchy was
restored. The new king, Louis XVIII, tried at first to reconcile the
restored monarchy with the reforms of the Revolution and Napoleon’s
empire. But his nobles were intent on revenge and imposed a second,
even more violent, White Terror against Jacobins and Bonapartists,
including some of Napoleon’s greatest generals.
Louis’s reactionary successor, his brother Charles X, was
interested only in renewing the traditions of the Ancien Régime, even
having himself anointed and crowned at the ancient cathedral of Reims.
But the middle classes were no longer prepared to tolerate the
restraints on their freedom, nor the worsening condition of the economy
in the hands of an incompetent aristocracy. They reasserted their
rights in the insurrection of July 1830 — the kind of liberal
revolution they would have preferred back in 1789 — paving the way for
the “bourgeois monarchy” of Louis-Philippe.
This last king of France, heir of the progressive Orléans
branch of the royal family, encouraged the country’s exploitation of
the Industrial Revolution and the complementary extension of its
overseas empire in Asia and Africa (Algeria had been occupied just
before the 1830 revolution). But the new factories created an urban
working class clamoring for improvement of its miserable working and
living conditions. The régime’s response of ferocious repression plus
numerous other ineptitudes led to a third revolution in 1848, with the
Bonapartists, led by Napoleon’s nephew, emerging triumphant.
The Second Republic ended four years later when the man
whom Victor Hugo called “Napoléon le Petit” staged a coup to become
Emperor Napoleon III. Determined to cloak himself in the legend of his
uncle’s grandeur, he saw his own role as that of champion of the
people. But he used harsh anti-press laws and loyalty oaths to quell
the libertarian spirit that had brought him to power.
The economy flourished thanks to the expansion of a
vigorous entrepreneurial capitalism in iron, steel, and railways,
augmented by overseas ventures such as the Suez Canal. Despite the
emperor’s obsession with the new “Red Peril” — the 1848 Communist
Manifesto of Marx and Engels, which was being circulated in Paris — he
could not prevent such social reforms as the workers’ right to form
unions and even to strike.
With the excessive enthusiasm that characterized the age,
Baron Haussmann’s urban planning redeveloped old Parisian neighborhoods
to create a more airy and spacious capital. Similarly, architect
Viollet-le-Duc often went overboard restoring some of the great Gothic
cathedrals and medieval châteaux in ways their original creators had
never imagined.
Victor Hugo, in exile in Guernsey, was writing Les
Misérables, while Baudelaire was working on Les Fleurs du Mal, and
Offenbach was composing jolly operettas, such as La Belle Hélène.
Courbet was painting his vast canvases of provincial life, and Manet
his Déjeuner sur l’Herbe.
Society was optimistic. The bourgeoisie showed off its new
prosperity with extravagant furnishings, silks, satins, and baubles,
and in 1852 Paris opened its first department store, Au Bon Marché.
France was developing a national identity of optimism, a high level of
social critique, and constant pressure for improvement.
But Germany had an account to settle. In 1870, Prussian
Chancellor Bismarck exploited an obscure diplomatic conflict with
France to unite the various German principalities and kingdoms into a
fighting force well equipped for war. After a lightning victory over
the ill-prepared French armies, the Germans marched on Paris and laid
siege to the city, which finally capitulated in January 1871 in the
face of dwindling food supplies. As part of the settlement ending the
war, Alsace and a portion of Lorraine were ceded to Germany.
The Third Republic
Defeat shattered the Second Empire. While the new Third
Republic’s government under Adolphe Thiers negotiated the terms of
surrender, the workers’ communes refused to give in. In March 1871 they
took over Paris and a few provincial cities, and held out for ten brave
but desperately disorganized weeks. In the end they were brutally
crushed by government troops and order was restored.
France resumed its industrial progress, quickly paid off
its enormous war-reparations debt to Germany, and expanded its overseas
empire in North and West Africa and Indochina. Rediscovered national
pride found its perfect expression in the Eiffel Tower, thrust into the
Paris skies for the international exhibition of 1889.
In 1874, the first exhibition of Impressionism had blown
away the dust and cobwebs of the artistic establishment. Novelist Emile
Zola poured forth arguments against industrial exploitation. Rodin,
more restrained, sculpted masterpieces such as Le Penseur (The
Thinker). Leading the “republican” hostility to the Church’s
entrenched position in the schools, in 1882 Jules Ferry enacted the
legislation that has formed the basis of France’s formidable state
education system ever since.
On the right, nationalist forces were motivated by a desire
to hit back at Germany, seeing all contact with foreigners or any form
of “cosmopolitanism” as a threat to national honor and integrity. For
many, the Jews were the embodiment of this threat — Edouard Drumont’s
vehemently anti-Semitic La France Juive (Jewish France) was a runaway
national bestseller. It appeared in 1886, eight years before Captain
Alfred Dreyfus, an Alsatian Jew in the French Army, was arrested on
what proved to be trumped-up charges of spying for the Germans. In a
case that pitted the fragile honor of the Army against the very
survival of French republican democracy, the captain had to wait 12
years for full rehabilitation.
The desire for revenge against Germany remained. And as
Germany’s own imperial ambitions grew, competition for world markets
became intense. Most of France went enthusiastically into World War I,
and came out of it victorious yet bled white. With the 1919 Treaty of
Versailles, France recovered Alsace and Lorraine; but 1,350,000 men had
been lost in the four years of fighting. The national economy was
shattered, and political divisions were more extreme than ever.
In face of the fears aroused by the Russian Revolution of
1917, the conservative parties dominated the immediate post-war period,
while a new French Communist Party, loyal to Moscow, split with the
Socialists in 1920. France seemed less aware of the threat from Nazi
Germany, allowing Hitler to remilitarize the Rhineland in 1936 in
breach of the Versailles Treaty, a step Hitler later said he had never
dreamt of getting away with.
In the 1930s, extreme right-wing groups such as Action
Française and Croix-de-Feu (Cross of Fire) provided a strong
antidemocratic undercurrent to the political turmoil of financial
scandal and parliamentary corruption. The bloody 1934 riots on the
Place de la Concorde in Paris offered a disturbing echo to the street
fighting in Fascist Italy and Nazi Germany.
The left-wing parties responded by banding together in a
Popular Front, which the Socialists led to power in 1936. Within the
first few weeks, Léon Blum’s government nationalized the railways,
brought in a 40-hour week, and instituted the workers’ first holidays
with pay. But the Communists broke the alliance after Blum first failed
to support the Republicans in the Spanish Civil War and then — faced
with financial difficulties — put a brake on the reforms.
War and Peace
Blum’s government collapsed in 1938, and the new prime
minister, Edouard Daladier, found himself negotiating the Munich
agreements with Hitler, Mussolini, and Britain’s Neville Chamberlain. A
year later, France was once again at war with Germany.
Relying too complacently on the defensive strategy of the
fortified Maginot Line along the northeast frontier with Germany (but
not facing Belgium), the French were totally unprepared for the German
invasion across the Ardennes in May 1940. With fast-moving tanks and
superior air power, the Germans reached Paris 30 days later. Marshal
Philippe Pétain, the hero of World War I, capitulated on behalf of the
French on June 16. Two days later, on BBC radio’s French service from
London, General de Gaulle appealed for national resistance.
Compared with other occupied countries such as Belgium,
Holland, and Denmark, France’s collaboration with the Germans is an
inglorious story. Based in the Auvergnat spa town of Vichy, the French
government often proved more zealous than its masters in suppressing
civil liberties and drawing up anti-Jewish legislation. It was French
police who rounded up the deportees for the concentration camps, many
of them denounced by French civilians seeking to profit from the
confiscation of property. The fighters of the underground Resistance
movement were heroic, but they were a tiny minority, a few of them
conservative patriots like de Gaulle, most of them socialists and
communists, and also a handful of refugees from Eastern Europe.
Deliverance came when the Allies landed on the beaches of
Normandy on D-Day (6 June 1944). De Gaulle, with his canny sense of
history, took an important step toward rebuilding national
self-confidence by insisting that French armed forces fight side by
side with the Americans and British for the liberation of the country,
but, above all, that the French army be the first to enter Paris
itself.
After the high emotion of de Gaulle’s march down the
Champs-Elysées, the business of post-war reconstruction, though boosted
by the generous aid of the Americans’ Marshall Plan, proved arduous,
and the wartime alliance of de Gaulle’s conservatives and the Communist
Party soon broke down. The general could not tolerate the political
squabbles of the Fourth Republic and withdrew from public life.
Governments changed repeatedly, but the French muddled
through. Intellectuals debated the existentialist merit of Albert Camus
and Jean-Paul Sartre in Paris’s Left Bank cafés.
The French empire was collapsing. After France’s fruitless
last stand in Vietnam, Pierre Mendès-France wisely negotiated an
Indochinese peace settlement. He handed Pondicherry over to India and
in the North African colonies gave Tunisia its independence, but was
ousted from office as hostilities broke out in Algeria.
De Gaulle returned from the wilderness in 1958, ostensibly
to keep Algeria French. But he’d seen the writing on the wall and
brought the war to an end with Algerian independence in 1962. His major
task was to rescue France from the chaos of the Fourth Republic. The
new constitution, tailor-made to de Gaulle’s authoritarian
requirements, placed the president above parliament, where he could
pursue his own policies outside the messy arena of party politics.
However, the colonial struggles in Algeria and Morocco were to have
significant impact on French national identity in later years. As the
empire receded, colonized populations from North and Central Africa,
Indochina, and elsewhere began to move to France and alter the French
identity once more.
De Gaulle’s visions of grandeur, and of a country
independent of NATO and the Warsaw Pact, gave France a renewed
self-confidence. One of his great achievements was a close alliance
with West Germany, overcoming centuries of bloodshed between the two
peoples.
But with self-confidence came complacency, and the French
bourgeoisie was cast again onto shifting ground with the massive
student rebellions of 1968. The “events of May” that erupted in Paris’s
Latin Quarter and swiftly spread through the country disturbed
de Gaulle enough for him to seek reassurance with his troops stationed
in West Germany.
In the end, people were reluctant to make a complete change
until 1981, when the forces for reform gathered sufficient strength to
elect François Mitterrand as the Fifth Republic’s first Socialist
president. Like the Popular Front in 1936, the new government began
with a quick-fire set of reforms — a broad program of nationalization,
abolition of the death penalty, raising the minimum wage, and the
introduction of a fifth week of holiday with pay — until the impact of
the world economic crisis imposed a necessary brake. Special emphasis
was placed on cultural programs, with generous subsidies for theater,
cinema, museums, and libraries, and also for scientific research.
Probably the most important reform was the least glamorous:
the decentralization that increased regional autonomy and reversed the
age-old trend of concentrating political, economic, and administrative
power in the national capital. By allowing the local pride of such
historic regions as Provence, Normandy, Brittany, and Languedoc to
reassert itself, France demonstrated that it was at last secure in its
national identity — so secure that French citizens even began carrying
European passports. As a founding member of the European Community,
France looked to a wider, continental challenge in the 1990s.
Yet modern France struggles with similar identity issues as
its European Union neighbors. The number of French citizens with
non-French heritage is substantial, reviving nationalist sentiment in
the form of the Front National. As a result, France experiences
diversity and tension within cultural, social, and political spheres.
The French team that won the 1998 World Cup was deemed by some
unsuitable to represent France because of the mixed heritage of the
players. At the same time, the team accurately reflected the social
diversity that exists in France today.
New corporate and fast-food cultures, along with more
freedom of movement among European Union countries and a more
international perspective, have further changed the social landscape.
Today, the onion seller with beret and bicycle is becoming as much an
anomaly in France’s urban and suburban setting as he would be in
America.
